Introducing Iver Caroline Hunt, 8 lbs., 3 ounces, 20 inches long.

Born Wednesday, Dec. 2 at 6:12 p.m.

We’re so happy. And tired. And happy.

We’re all getting to know one another. She’s a fresh baked little bird, with a full head of dark brown hair, a set of to-die-for dimples and lots of wiggles.  Pat and I are taking a crash course in true sleep deprivation and new parenthood. Surprises: Everything looks brighter! Tastes better! Is more interesting!

The other night, Pat and I fell into a fit of uncontrollable laughter for 10 minutes over a poopy diaper. I caught myself there, in the middle of the night in the dark, laughing until it hurt, and I thought WOW. Oh, wow!

We’re so excited! xoxoxoxo

Angie, Pat and Iver

©2010 angie newsome. All Rights Reserved.

I’ve thought a lot about what to say about her, but I get all choked up about it and can’t seem to put a sentence together that can really say how much I love her and how much she means to me. Her name is Ruby Byrd Whitson. She grew up in what are now empty woods behind a church that sits on a grassy knoll not far from the house she and Willard raised five kids in, including my mother, Willa, who was the oldest. She is funny and kind and tells great stories and always holds my hand for hours on end when I visit. She quilted and sewed all the time when I was a kid and would visit for weeks every summer. She filled her time crocheting and reading until last year when her eyesight started going bad. She moved several years ago to a nursing home because it’s so difficult, no, nearly impossible, to find people to care for older people in their homes in Mitchell County. She doesn’t need round-the-clock nursing care, just someone to cook food every once in a while and to be there to make sure she doesn’t fall. My Aunt Ginger and Aunt Peggy visit her all the time, even though they live in Indiana and Georgia now.

Today, we’re meeting my sister, who is driving up the mountain with her seven-year-old daughter. My sister is also nearly about to give birth to a son they plan to name Whitson after my mom and Ruby and Willard. So, this day feels so big to me and the importance isn’t lost but I haven’t yet processed it or thought about what it all means. Grandmama’s made it to 100 — and hopefully well beyond — when my grandfather, mother and father didn’t. And today I plan to tell her how thankful I am to spend this day with her, how thankful I am that she’s been in my life. Today, I’ll sit beside her and hold her hand.

©2010 angie newsome. All Rights Reserved.

When I was in high school, my dad, sister and I spent a lot of time volunteering. We worked at a camp for the developmentally disabled, taking groups of teenagers and adults on summertime field trips like horseback riding and swimming. (I even got a black eye in the pool one day when another volunteer tossed a kid onto my head. Ouch!) One of the reasons I chose to go to Warren Wilson College was because of its emphasis on community service, and as a junior and senior, I worked in the college’s Service Learning Office designing and editing a national journal about why and how colleges and students should incorporate community service into their academic programs.

After a hiatus of sorts — family and work responsibilities can overwhelm at times — I find myself compelled, again, to be more involved. President Obama’s call to service was and is such a moving message to me that it’s inspiring me, again, to find more ways to contribute to my own community.

One of the best places I’ve volunteered with so far has been at the Asheville-based MANNA Food Bank. While I’m a deep believer in organizing for real, systematic change in the community, I also believe in meeting people’s needs now, particularly for basic needs such as housing and food. Consider this:

• There are more than 35 million people who are hungry in the United States. Nearly 40 percent of these people are children, and 10 percent are elderly.
• The numbers of people living in poverty in the 18 western counties range from nearly 10 percent to 20 percent of the population.
• The numbers of hungry people in Western North Carolina are twice the national rate, which is one in 12. That means one in every six people living in Western North Carolinian is hungry. I know there are people in my neighborhood who use local organizations to get help. There are probably some in your neighborhood, too.

Last week, Pat and I volunteered at MANNA to sort apples and make packages of food for elementary school kids to take home over the weekends. These tiny, back-pack sized packages of canned vegetables and spaghetti and meatballs go home with children who receive free or low-cost lunches at school — nationally, 30.5 million children received these lunches every day in 2007.

While we volunteered, we learned, as has been reported locally, that even though food donations have remained steady at the food bank, demand has really spiked across the region, leaving MANNA’s food resources stretched. It’s worth noting here that Charity Navigator, an organization that serves as a consumer watchdog on charities, gives MANNA only two of four possible stars (four being the best), mainly — from what I can tell — because growth in both revenues and expenses have decreased and their working capital ratio is also very, very small.

There are many root causes for hunger — low wages, unemployment, poverty. These need long-term — and sometimes political — solutions. In the meantime, I want to help make sure my neighbors have enough food to eat and that kids have enough food to eat over the weekends, when they aren’t at school and can’t get lunch there. If you want to help, too, there are lots of volunteer opportunities directly through MANNA, or you can sign on with Hands On Asheville-Buncombe, which offers volunteer opportunities in a wide variety of areas — from working on hunger to the environment. Statewide, the North Carolina Hunger Forum is working to cut hunger in half by 2015. There’s also a Raleigh-based group, Stop Hunger Now, dedicated to stopping hunger internationally, and Feeding America can give you some places to start helping other locations.

There are hundreds of hunger-fighting organizations across the country, so if you’re thinking of donating donate money to these or any other organization, take a little time to do your homework first. Look at nonprofit researchers GuideStar or Charity Navigator and check with a consumer protection agency (like the Better Business Bureau’s Wise Giving Alliance) to make sure you’re informed about what your money will do. Ask around and see what works for you, what your neighbors or colleagues recommend. 

Either way, now is the time to help. Part of my goals for the year include volunteering at least 40 hours. I’ll let you know where and how that works out. But, I’d like to know about you, too. Did Obama’s call to service move you to action? What are you doing and/or planning to do to make your community a better place for everyone?

©2010 angie newsome. All Rights Reserved.

Yesterday we went to the tree lot tucked behind the Farmer’s Market. I’ve decided that I love the Farmer’s Market, despite its tendency to be more of a wholesaler market than a true farmer’s market. It’s my type of place, which is, essentially, one filled with old people and hoop cheese. What can I say? I’m from rural North Carolina, after all.

We pulled up, parked, and … bought the first tree we saw. Yep, for all the tree love I have coursing through my veins, it never fails that we pull up to a stall, walk about five feet and find the perfect Frasier fir. We bought it from a man with the bluest eyes you’ve ever seen, who lives in Little Canada, a tiny community off the Tuckasegee River in Jackson County. Across North Carolina, there are an estimated 50 million of these trees on over 25,000 acres, and he and his wife have 14 acres of land filled with these trees. A couple of years ago the two put out 1,200 baby trees by hand. It took them three days. 

I imagine that they go to sleep and night and dream about trees. They have to watch for red spiders, which crawl in the little bitty buds at the tips of the limbs and make them explode. They have to use big, long machete-ish knives to sheer the trees into the perfect cones. They have to worry about drought and frosts. And that’s just until they get them to the market, where he’ll be until Christmas Eve, watching over the trees he’s selling there and trying, I imagine, to make a small profit. Years of work go into this season. The 12-foot trees (which we did not buy, by the way, because that would just be silly) take eight to nine years to grow. He said the drought we’ve had has slowed down their growth a bit, making them a little bit fatter rather than a little bit taller. Sometimes they think about going out and setting them all on fire, he laughed.

I understand this, the love-hate of the work you’ve chosen. It’s a fine, fine line, even for Christmas trees and even if, in the end, what you grow brings someone like me who stands talking in your forest of swinging trees, pulling at the leaves and smelling the piney scent on her hands and dreaming of lights.

©2010 angie newsome. All Rights Reserved.

When I’m in these moments, I feel this soaring joy at being alive. I know it’s a sentimental thought, but I love it then.

When I was in Boston recently (which was, by the way, filled with these moments!), we wandered around the streets of Arlington on Halloween night. Little Tairou was dressed as a lion and my friends Melody and Josh pulled him along in the dark as he sat in the back of a red wagon and we tried to coax him to say “trick or treat” to perfect strangers. Early in the night, we turned a corner and saw a group of people gathered at one side of the street, so we all wandered over there, too.  A tall, muscled, red-haired, pony-tailed guy was bent over a set of tables erected on the side of his yard. A small desk lamp was propped on a music player, sending beams of light onto tubs of hot dogs and vats of chili. When he saw us, he sang out a big hello and he started dishing out bowls of chili for us, telling us he’d won awards for his slow-cook chili.

We stood around on the sidewalk, balancing bowls of warm, tomato-y chili in our hands, as he told us about growing up in this house, in this neighborhood. Every Halloween, he tries to cook something for people in the neighborhood. He and I started talking about barbecue — he’s getting a smoker built, he said — and when he told us he a musician, he ran inside to get us some CDs of his band, the Dave Sammarco Band. When I asked if I could take his picture, he said, “Hold on, let me get my glasses on.”

I could have stayed there all night talking with him about living in Arlington and his band and his burgeoning catering business. But we slid on down the sidewalk to gather more candy and head to a nearby Korean restaurant. It was the perfect night, the perfect Boston moment. Do you have these moments, too?

©2010 angie newsome. All Rights Reserved.

When Pat started building this house, we didn’t think we would really move here. We loved our house in Swannanoa and we had dreams of selling this one and going around the world: Thailand and Vietnam, maybe a stop in Spain. But things changed. The housing market slowed down and as the months ticked by, we started counting our pennies. One weekend, we called up our friend Jack to ask if he wanted to buy our Swannanoa house. (What’s the saying I want to put here? A bird in the hand is better than two in the bush?) After the phone call, we started packing.

A year later — even though there are boxes I still haven’t unpacked cluttering the basement and I sometime wake up and think we’re in our other house — I realize that I love this neighborhood. It didn’t take long, this growing love, to settle on me. I even admitted as much in my contributor’s bio for the latest issue of WNC Magazine, wherein I am quoted saying that I live on the best street in West Asheville. And NO ONE called me out on it, so it must be true!

But what I’ve also been reminded of over these last 12 months is what it is to be a Good Neighbor. That’s where Ginger comes in. She’s a little shy.

Not really. Ginger has got to be one of the least shy people you’ll ever meet, which is why I find this photo hilarious.

Let me introduce you to her, because she was one of the first neighbors to introduce herself to us. That was just the beginning. She has helped friends buy and move into houses along our street. She organizes a monthly poker game and always sends me an invitation. She planted rows of tomatoes, peppers and squash, which becomes a community garden because she lets anyone come and pick them if they want. Her fenced-in backyard is frequently populated with groups of dogs, both her own and ones she’s taking care of. When someone moved away this year and left a starving, sick cat behind, she adopted it and named it Sweetie. She worries over some neighborhood kids and takes care of others when their parents need to take a sudden trip to the ER. She cuddles the babies. She also always stops to talk when she sees you outside and always, always has nice compliments to offer and helps out in crises and celebrations.

(Wow, I was impressed before, but just writing this makes me feel like a self centered, undependable shut-in.)

She is unfailingly, absolutely unique. I’m so thankful for her! She has, whether she knows it or not, helped make my feelings of homesickness — both for my old house and that old romantic idea of home and community — dissipate, even as dust still collects on those moving boxes I’ve yet to unpack.

©2010 angie newsome. All Rights Reserved.

I had just got down the mountain, the one that forms this physical and mental barrier between western North Carolina and the rest of the state that stretches itself out like a cat purring to the sea. Down that mountain and I felt myself leaving.

Outside of Morganton, I followed the curve to the left. I was daydreaming, about what I don’t remember. I was listening to the radio when I saw this flock of birds — hundreds of the them, so many that the sky was darkened — just as the announcer slid into a twang, a strum, a hum. Country, but not. Alternative, but not as flippant. The birds floated like a bubble over the fields next to the interstate. The dipped and swirled and veered. And I suddenly felt homesick for Kathryn. Kathryn, are you reading this? I wanted to call you so badly right then. I wanted to stop by your house in Greensboro and listen to records and pet Buddy and listen to your stories. Hey, friend! I miss you!

©2010 angie newsome. All Rights Reserved.

For the last year and a half, I’ve been following two women at Black Mountain Correctional Center for Women. I sat with them through a re-entry program and their subsequent class graduation, interviewed them in the cafeteria and library for hours upon hours, talked with them about everything from how they got in prison to their work-release jobs to what they’ll do when they walk out of the administration building for the last time. Notebooks are piled in my office, filled with my scribbling about our conversations, their stories, thoughts, feelings.

And today! Debbie! Was! Released! After five years of living in a N.C. Department of Corrections facility, a sargeant’s voice rumbled over the PA system, calling out her name, telling her to go to the administration building. It was for the last time. Cheers and clapping erupted in the yard, where women in green-blue shirts and shirt dresses sat smoking or listening to music at concrete picnic tables. She went inside and 20 minutes later, she came out arms filled with white plastic bags holding all her stuff. She and her probation officer loaded them in the trunk of the officer’s car, and she climbed in the backseat. I stood in the parking lot, watching. As she rode away, her face was turned to the red brick dormatory where she’d lived the last two years. The sun shone on her face. And suddenly this feeling hopefulness flooded over me.

If you know me or my writing very well, you’ll know that I don’t believe in the “objective journalist.” Do I believe in being fair? Oh, absolutely. For the last 1.5 years I’ve been practicing fairness. But today I felt so proud of her, so hopeful for her future, so happy that she won’t have to ask anyone whether she can go to the bathroom or sit on a bench ever again. (She is the first to tell you that she needed to be in prison, that there wasn’t a choice almost. But that was five years ago, and a lot has changed, I’m hoping. Now, I’m so happy that she’s back!)

And it must be catching, these New Starts, because a woman I worked with at the newspaper is leaving the paper today to go teach English in South Korea with her husband. Wow.

I’m ready for a change, too. And, really, there was nothing left to do except jump up and down outside my house, happy that I feel one coming.

©2010 angie newsome. All Rights Reserved.

©2010 angie newsome. All Rights Reserved.

Once upon a time, there was a dog who pooped in the house and the mother got him a new litterbox. And it was purple. And it was a girl named Sammy. And he started pooping a lot. The end.

(That’s Sammy pooping in the house.)

-by Sammy Martin

(illustration by Angie)

©2010 angie newsome. All Rights Reserved.